


Through the Eyes of Others

by SemperIntrepida



Series: Elegiad [7]
Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Playthrough, Canon-Typical Violence, Deimos!Alexios - Freeform, Gen, tw: a brief mention of child abuse, where deimos goes dark subjects follow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:34:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21675352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SemperIntrepida/pseuds/SemperIntrepida
Summary: In which the Pythia of Delphi, Deimos, and Herodotos each have a run-in with Kassandra, the Eagle Bearer.
Series: Elegiad [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1531004
Comments: 8
Kudos: 34





	Through the Eyes of Others

**Author's Note:**

> This one-shot is part of a linked series of stories, and while you don't have to read them all, they do combine into a unified narrative.

**The False Seer**

The Pythia of Delphi was unsettled, and she paced around her chambers, unable to sit or rest after her encounter with the strange visitor who'd arrived in her temple along with the shadows of twilight. Unlike the usual litany of merchants, politicians, and generals who came to see her, this petitioner had been a woman of unnerving stature, fully armed and armored as if she'd come straight from Themiscyra — though it wasn't the woman's weapons that had shaken the Pythia, but the sight of her face.

The woman was the Child on the Mountain. The Pythia was certain of it, for the Artifact under the Temple of Apollo had shown her that face in vision after vision. She'd seen a young girl flung from Mount Taygetos and survive the fall, then watched her grow into a woman in the years after that. The Cult had taken a particular interest in these visions, demanding that the Pythia inform them whenever one occurred. She knew they searched for the Child on the Mountain with murderous intent.

Those targeted by the Cult never lived for long, so how had the woman made it to Delphi alive?

The Pythia was suddenly grateful for the guards that watched her every move. She could hear their footsteps circling the gravel paths around her home, a sound that had grown as familiar to her as the chimes in the temple and the birdsong in the olive groves nearby. They'd even sent a misthios to watch over her despite her strenuous objections. He kept a bear as a pet! In her fucking atrium!

She poured herself a cup of sweet wine and drank deep. To almost every Greek, she was the most powerful person alive, able to shape the world in the image of her divine pronouncements. She was wealthy beyond belief, and had surrounded herself with opulent furnishings, art, and rugs. She wore the finest clothes and the prettiest jewels. She'd even been able to invest in a few side ventures of her own that brought her ever more petitioners — along with their generous offerings. Wealth and power were hers, and a visit from some woman play-acting as a warrior should have brought her no concern.

The Pythia needed another drink. She refilled her cup and set the jug of wine back on the table. But in that moment's pause, she heard nothing but silence where there should have been footsteps. Her stomach knotted. She put the cup down, took a step towards the door to her chambers, and—

The doors slammed open as if they'd been kicked, and in the doorway stood the Child on the Mountain herself, as huge and terrifying as one of the death spirits of Nix.

"Guards!" The Pythia heard her own voice go shrill as she realized that if the woman was here at her doorstep, there was no one left who could help her now.

The woman walked towards her. "I'm not here to hurt you, I just want answers," she said, holding her open hands out in a gesture of peace that only made the Pythia shudder. The woman towered over her, and everything about her seemed larger than life: her hands, the muscles on her arms, her broad shoulders. She could have slipped into any tale of the gods and not been out of place.

Even so, her violation of the Pythia's private chambers was an outrage. "The Pythia is a sacred vessel of the gods. People travel the world for my answers. But none of them would dare break into my home. Apollo's wrath will be cruel and swift."

The woman's eyes narrowed. "Enough with your lies! You will tell me what I want to know."

Suddenly, one of those larger-than-life hands was wrapped around the Pythia's throat, and it began squeezing the air out of her. "I can't... brea—" she wheezed as she clawed at the woman's bracered forearm, her fingers bruising against metal. She felt herself being pulled upwards, close enough to see the burnished bronze of the woman's eyes staring at her in anger. Dark smears began to swirl in the corners of the Pythia's vision, closing in upon her...

"If you lie to me, I'll cut your throat."

Then the woman's grip loosened and the Pythia sucked in a great gasp of air. Her whole body went numb, and she felt tears coming on, tears she fought back with everything she had, for she refused to let this brute of a woman see her cry. "I'm dead already. _They'll_ find out you were here. And they'll kill me for it."

"Who? This Cult everyone keeps talking about?"

If the situation wasn't so dire, the Pythia would have laughed. How little this woman knew.

"Speak!" the woman said, cocking her hand back in a threat.

The Pythia raised her hands, trying to forestall a blow. "Yes, the Cult of Kosmos wants you dead. They know you're here. They are the eyes that see, but go unseen."

"Enough riddles. I want names."

That was one thing the Pythia couldn't answer. "I don't know! I swear. They hide behind masks and shrouds." Masks and shrouds and threats.

The woman drew in a deep breath. "So all those prophecies from the gods, all those people... You've been deceiving them all?"

"Most want to know about love or death. I tell them what they want to hear. But when people want to know about war or politics, I'm paid very well to tell them what the _Cult_ wants them to hear."

"And that's why you work for them? For the drachmae?"

It was never about the drachmae, though wrapping herself in the trappings of wealth had soothed her helplessness over the years. "I have no choice. They'll kill me if I don't."

"Even if this is all a deception, you said you saw visions of me. You knew what I'd done in Kephallonia. How?"

She explained the visions she'd received from the Artifact under the temple, and how it revealed what only the gods should know, past, present, and future.

The woman took several long breaths as she absorbed this information. "You have an opportunity to do the right thing. Tell me where to find the Cult."

The Pythia knew the Cult would kill her soon. Her tears threatened to fall once again, and again she fought them back. But then a thought struck her: maybe this woman could do the impossible. Maybe she could disrupt the Cult, distract them long enough for the Pythia to make an escape. "There's an ancient chamber beneath the Temple of Apollo," she said. "I think they meet there. But without one of their cloaks and masks, you won't make it more than two steps inside."

"What do these masks look like?"

She shuddered, remembering. "Like white masks from a theatre, but marked with red paint. And their shrouds are black with neckpieces of gold."

The woman's face didn't reveal if she considered this information good or bad. She simply said, "Thank you."

The Pythia wanted this unwelcome visitor out of her home. She pointed at the doorway. "Now go. You bring nothing but darkness with you."

The woman bowed, and to the Pythia the formality of it seemed to mock her. Then the woman turned and strode out of the chamber, closing its doors behind her, and the Pythia was left to contemplate the things she had done, and what she needed to do, if she had any hope of getting out of Delphi alive.

.oOo.

**The Weapon**

Deimos stood before the guards at the entrance to the sanctum, holding a blood-drenched bag in one hand, and once he knew he had their attention, he reached into the bag and pulled out a human head, reveling as they all flinched in revulsion. He threw the empty bag into the face of the nearest guard, then walked past them without saying a word.

His fingers tightened in the greasy hair atop the head. He didn't kill the man the head had belonged to — someone else had denied him that pleasure — but he had chopped through that neck himself, and placed the head in a bag, and brought it all the way here from the Valley of the Snake. Like all cultists, Elpenor had thought himself very clever. But the fucking fool had gotten himself killed anyway, and his assassin had known enough to take his fragment of the Artifact with them along with his mask and shroud.

In the chamber below, the cultists huddled together in small groups, whispering and scheming. But whispers and schemes were nothing without action. Deimos kicked over a large brazier that burned at the sanctum's entrance, and the sound of heavy bronze crashing against stone turned the attention of everyone in the room upon him.

The cultists gathered like sheep in a circle around the Artifact as he approached, and he threw the head into their midst. It landed with a sodden thump, Elpenor's eyes staring sightlessly at the floor.

Deimos found their shocked silence a balm. "Elpenor is dead," he said, as he walked within the circle. "One of you is a traitor."

No cultist would meet his eyes as he strolled among them. Some shuffled nervously, unsure of what he would do next. He paused and breathed in, taking pleasure in tasting the sour tang of their fear.

He resumed his stroll around the circle. "The Artifact will expose them." Such was the power of his birthright: at his command, the Artifact would reveal a person's deepest secrets. Someone in this room had a secret they didn't want to share.

"Everyone will be tested." He picked a cultist at random, grabbing them by the back of the neck and shoving them to the floor before the Artifact's base. The Artifact itself was a glowing pyramid whose sides were formed by the triangular fragments issued to each member of the Cult, and Deimos noted that tonight, none of the fragments were missing.

The cultist he'd chosen cowered in front of the Artifact, their mask reflecting molten gold in its unnatural light. Deimos grabbed him by the hand — a man's hand, soft and uncalloused — and wrenched him up to his feet. "You first," he said, as he pressed the hand against the Artifact's surface alongside his own. Golden sparks swirled around them, and Deimos felt the familiar vertigo of dropping into someone else's memories. Brief scenes filled his vision: ingots of silver, a large wooden crane lowering a hook into a mine, beaches of white sand. This wasn't the traitor. He tossed the man aside with a dismissive "Go."

He picked out another one, pushing them towards the Artifact. They both touched the surface, and Deimos saw sails waving in the wind, and then a ship on fire in the night. This was not the traitor either. "Go."

No one in the chamber moved, afraid of attracting his notice. It didn't matter; he would test every one even if it took all night. He turned, slowly scanning the masked faces until his eyes settled on a cultist whose robes couldn't hide their warrior's stature. "You," he said, gesturing them towards the Artifact.

This cultist didn't move like the others, not a merchant's diffident steps or a sea captain's rolling gait. No, this one moved like a fighter. Deimos's fingers twitched. He looked forward to seeing this one's memories.

Their hands touched the Artifact, and then Deimos _saw_ : a young girl running through a night-dark forest, torches following in the distance... the same girl with her family, the father holding a baby in his arms... lightning streaking across a night sky, its flash illuminating a priest holding a baby at the top of a cliff, and then the baby and priest falling as the girl stood at the edge, looking down...

Deimos jerked his hand away from the Artifact as the image of the girl's face seared itself into his vision, an intruder in a story he knew well because the story was his own.

Then he heard a woman's voice, low and unfamiliar. "Alexios?"

He had not heard that name in a very long time. It had been beaten out of him as a child, along with a great many other things. Weakness leaving the body. That name belonged to a time before he had the strength of the gods, when he cowered under blows and cried in the darkness and fear was all he knew. It was that fear he tasted now, all the more bitter by being his own. "Who are you?" he asked, instead of drawing his sword and running the woman through with it.

She didn't answer, but he knew. He knew who she was.

"Go," he said, instead of killing his own sister.

His stomach turned at his own weakness, and he pointed at the nearest cultist. "You. Get up here." He went through the motions of using the Artifact just long enough for the disgust to overcome him, and he slammed the cultist face-first into the point of the pyramid. The man fell over onto his back. Deimos straddled him and punched him in the face, over and over, letting the rage burn away his fear as the man's face pulped under his fist.

He could feel the terror flowing off the cultists around him in acrid waves, and he stood up and smiled as blood ran down his fingers and dripped on the stone floor.

Terror was his name and terror was his weapon, and soon he would find his sister again and make her feel the fear and pain she had given him all those years ago. Then another long-forgotten name returned to him from the past, a name upon which to focus his anger. Her name. Kassandra.

.oOo.

**The Historian**

Herodotos had spent a lifetime traveling the world, chronicling the histories of poets, warriors, and kings, and none of them were as confounding as the woman known as Kassandra, the Eagle Bearer. At first, he expected her to be nothing more than a common mercenary, hungry for drachmae and armed with more brawn than cunning, but she had quickly disabused him of that notion. No mere mercenary would carry the Spear of Leonidas, and she'd been clever enough to understand the implied threat in the prophecy the Oracle had given him. _"Spring should not wish for winter..."_

Kassandra intrigued him, and he lingered in Delphi longer than he'd originally planned, long enough to see her work. She was not an analytical thinker, bound by the rigid strictures of logic. Instead, she operated on intuition and a canny sense of human nature, and yes, brawn when the situation demanded it, preferring to leap into action and let the gods sort out the rest. Yet despite the dark nature of her Ares-given talents, she was quick to crack a joke, and she had an easy rapport with those she trusted, like the captain of her ship, though her interactions with Herodotos had remained guarded. She was also uncommonly brave, readily choosing to descend into the Cult's hidden sanctum, alone and unarmed, without any knowledge of what she'd find there once inside.

It was her weapons and armor he stood vigil over now, as he waited for her to return from that den of snakes. They'd agreed to meet at a certain fountain outside of Delphi, and Herodotos was to wait for her until nightfall the next day. If she failed to appear before then, he'd assume she was dead and take the Spear with him to Athens.

The Spear of Leonidas could never fall into the Cult's hands.

She arrived at the fountain just before sunrise, still wearing the Cult's mask and shroud, but she was not the same Kassandra he'd left the night before at the sanctum's outside gates. Gone was her confident swagger and purposeful stride, replaced with the sagging shoulders and plodding steps of the hopelessly lost. Herodotos felt his heart constrict in his chest, and he shivered as if chilled.

She slumped onto a stone bench and stared at the fountain's waters. "There were people in the temple. I couldn't see their faces." Her voice was flat, and he felt himself shiver again. "They... Herodotos, they control all of the Greek world. Everything."

He clasped his hands behind his back and straightened, trying to will his spine to iron. "I see. It's worse than I thought."

"There's more. They have a weapon."

"What... kind?"

"A soldier. Stronger and more ferocious than any I've ever seen. Herodotos, it's my brother," she said, her voice cracking.

"We need to get to Athens."

"Athens? We need to find my mother." She stood up suddenly. "My clothes. My spear."

"Of course," he said, turning to retrieve them.

"My spear!" She was almost frantic, pacing to and fro until he handed over the heavy bundle of armor and weapons. She tossed the mask and shroud to the ground and tore into the bundle, and it wasn't until she'd tightened the last straps on her breastplate and snugged her spear into its sheath that she finally calmed down.

It was time for Herodotos to tell her about the man he worked for: Perikles, the elected leader of democratic Athens, who was working to stop this endless war between his polis and Sparta. If this Cult conspired against him, he needed to be warned, and her eyewitness account would be far stronger than anything Herodotos himself could say.

Despite Kassandra's skepticism at the effectiveness of Perikles's leadership, Herodotos pressed her to decide her next course of action. "We need to go."

"To Athens?! They're hunting my family. My mother. I have to find her."

His frustration grew. "You carry the blade of Leonidas. Act like it! If Perikles doesn't put an end to this war, we're all as good as dead — including your mother."

"Fuck your war!"

"You have a duty to the Greek world. We both do. Perikles must be warned."

"She is my _mother_. What would you have me do?"

Then he understood: she was driven by more than just drachmae, and her feelings of duty to Greece were specks of dust compared to her duty to her family. He changed tack. "If there is one place where we can find information about your mother, it is in Athens."

She crossed her arms. "How?"

Perikles had turned Athens into a haven for the brightest minds in the Greek world. Surely some scholar or historian could illuminate the path forward, and Perikles himself might be persuaded to lend some of his considerable resources to the task. As Herodotos explained his reasoning, he could see her begin to come around in agreement. He sighed in relief. It was always easier to work with someone who was open to rational arguments.

But there was one thing that itched at the back of his mind, one thing he needed to confirm before they sailed all the way to Attika. "Before we go to Athens, I need you to meet me at the Lion of Leonidas in Thermopylai."

Her brows creased. "The Lion of Leonidas? Why?"

"There's something I need to know. Something that may help us take down this Cult — and save your mother."

She seemed to trust him enough to accept that answer. "Very well. But let's make it quick, Herodotos. First Thermopylai, then we go to Athens." _This_ was the Kassandra he had met days ago, decisive and inclined to action instead of thinking.

Herodotos watched her as she walked away, a growing sense of unease taking root in his chest. Who knew how long this Cult had influenced the political machinations of the Greek city-states through its control of the flow of money and power. There wasn't a living being in Greece untouched by their shadowy actions, and the fate of all those lives would likely be determined by the decisions of a woman who was less a hero than someone very, very human.

He found that thought to be unsettling indeed.


End file.
